Posts Tagged ‘Yom Hashoah’

The Israeli band Balkan Beat Box will continue its successful world tour with a concert on Wednesday evening in Munich, Germany – striking a nerve for some in Israel because it is the start of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. All entertainment venues, from shows to restaurants, are shuttered in Israel on this day.

Band members said they were not aware of the problematic date and location when the show was booked, but after discussing the situation they decided to perform and deliver their message of embracing equality and being against racism.

After the performance, perhaps the band members would like to visit the beer hall where, on November 8, 1923, storm troopers under the direction of Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler burst into the place, causing instant panic, and Hitler fired a pistol shot into the ceiling, yelling “Silence! The National Revolution has begun!”

This week the Jewish world commemorated Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on the anniversary of the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto. A quick search on the Internet showed nearly 10,000 sites with information on the uprising by Jewish resistance fighters who fought valiantly against the Germans in Warsaw. The websites cover a wide range of material including pictures, maps, diagrams and memoirs. Also hidden among the historically correct sights are pages dedicated to Holocaust denial; they are written by people who beyond all evidentiary proof still say the Holocaust perpetrated by the Germans against the Jews during World War II is a myth.

When studying the events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising it is always best to go to the original sources. There have been many books and movies produced about the uprising, but although based on facts, stories such as “The Pianist,” the story of a musician who survived the war within the confines of the Ghetto, are brought into question as soon as even one small incident is changed for dramatic reasons.

There is a book that tells the story without any literary license and cannot be in dispute. The Stroop Report, is a facsimile edition and translation of the official German report on the day-to-day battle and destruction of the Ghetto. In the Stroop Report we see the forces used by the Germans, as well as the casualties suffered and those inflicted. It gives a blow-by-blow account of each action.

The report is very precise in its information, listing the number of troops assigned to each operation the dates and even times – hourly reports from the men in the field with time stamps. At the end of the report it lists every German soldier and foreign fighter by name, rank and unit that was killed or wounded in the various actions against the Jews. The reports were sent to the German SS general and general of the police, Friedrich William Krueger.

In the final report of May 23, 1943, Stroop, The German commander of Warsaw, said that “Of the total 56,065 Jews apprehended, about 7,000 were destroyed [murdered] directly in the course of the Grand Operation in the Jewish quarter, 6,929 were destroyed via transport to T II [Treblinka II], making a total of Jews destroyed 13,929. In addition to this figure an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 Jews were destroyed in explosions and fires.“

The Germans also destroyed “631 bunkers and listed a variety of captured arms including rifles, grenades, home-made bombs and incendiary devices.” The report goes onto say that the bombs and incendiary devices were “immediately put to use against the bandits.”

Listed among the booty was “about nine million zloty large amounts of foreign money including 9,200 gold dollars, and a large amount of Jewely (rings, necklaces, watches etc.)“

The last notation of the report states, “There are only eight buildings remaining in the Ghetto area being used for administration purposes, and the destroyed buildings would be a profitable source of brick and crushed rock.“

The report shows how thorough the Germans were in the destruction of the Jewish community of Warsaw and in their own words how they hunted down every Jew no matter the age or fighting ability, how they counted every stone from which they could make a profit. These pages written in their own hand are proof against all those who would deny the Holocaust.

Another source of the pure truth is the Ringelblum Archives. These archives are a collection of documents hidden during the battles for the Ghetto. They are comprised of German order posters, death notices, accounts written by the Jewish commanders, and even school report cards. The archives show from the side of the Jews how the German attack was fought off, not only with arms but with life. They include reports of a theater group, musical recitals and civility in the face of inhumanity. Dr. Emanuel Ringleblum, who was in charge of gathering the material, wrote before his death that the purpose of this archive is to “Scream the Truth at the World” and deny the lie that the Holocaust never happened.

This week Israelis observed Memorial Day and celebrated Independence Day. I have believed for years that the best way to commemorate these days is by turning them into a battle against the loss of perspective.

Memorial Day is the more troubling of the two days. The problem is that Israelis have lost their sense of Jewish perspective to such an extreme extent, and this becomes glaringly evident on Memorial Day. Israelis are incapable of viewing their problems and that of the state within the perspective of Jewish history, in large part because of the efforts of the secularist Israeli Left, which dominates civil discourse, the media, and academia and seeks to detach the state from Jewish history and deny any connection between “Israeli-ness” and Judaism.

This is reflected in a defeatism that is blindingly apparent on Memorial Day, whose atmosphere resembles that of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah, in nearly all things: the same siren, the same closing of cafes and restaurants, the same conversion of the media intoofficial mourners. The timing is also suggestive – Memorial Day is a week after Yom Hashoah.If anything, Memorial Day is the more dramatic of the two days, as there are two sirens sounded on Memorial Day but only one on Yom Hashoah. And this is not because the loss of soldiers is more recent. The bulk of the soldiers killed in Israel’s wars, more than half, died in the 1948-9 War of Independence, only three years after the Holocaust.

All sense of proportion has been lost. If you add up the numbers from all of Israel’s wars,roughly 21,000 soldiers and civilians have been killed. That’s similar to the number of Jewsmurdered every two days at Auschwitz at the height of its “efficiency.” In other words, hadAuschwitz operated just two days longer than it actually did, the loss of Jewish life during thattwo-day period would have equaled all of Israel’s military and civilians losses over more thanhalf a century. (The soldiers killed in Israel, of course, died in valor, defending their people andcountry.

Here we are, 56 years after the Holocaust, and Israel is still operating under the GrandOslo Delusion, still trying to “negotiate” with the Palestinians instead of achieving total militaryvictory over them. In modern Israel, the fact that one or two soldiers were killed per week inLebanon was cause for a panic-stricken retreat out of Lebanon to Israel’s “international border.

Two deaths a week of soldiers in Lebanon – deaths that could have been prevented but for the lack of courage among the country’s leadership – were thought to be sufficient reason forabandoning all rationality and determination, and for putting all of northern Israel under threat of massive bombardment. On the other front, Palestinians tossing rocks at soldiers in the 1980′s was sufficient reason for Israel to fall for the Oslo swindle of the 1990′s and invite an Islamofascist terrorist army to sit in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Oslo Israel is post-survivalist Israel, defeatist Israel, exhausted Israel. Oslo was based on a total loss of the ability to reason rationally, a loss of historic proportions, a relinquishment of reality for a make-pretend imaginary universe, and a complete loss in the Jewish determination to survive as a nation.

First and foremost, it was a complete loss in Jewish self-respect and dignity in Israel. Here we had the spectacle of Israeli leaders meeting, back-slapping and kissing the same Arabfascists who murdered Jewish children and only yesterday denied there had ever been aHolocaust, but at the same time insisting that if there had been one, the Jews deserved it.

The Israeli media continue to be the occupied territory of Israel’s extremist Left; theIndependence Day issue of Haaretz a couple of years back featured a banner op-ed by columnist Akiva Eldar entitled “To the Glory of the States of Israel and Palestine.” Eldar explained that Israel will never be truly independent until Palestine has pushed Israel behind its 1949 borders and liberated East Jerusalem.

In Oslo Israel, defeatism became the greatest form of triumphalism, cowardice became the highest form of courage, and McCarthyism was the greatest expression of democracy, at leastin the first few years after the Rabin assassination.

The Israeli military was as blinded by the loss of perspective as the rest of the country. The military leadership has been McClellenist since 1992, and was if anything ahead of the restof the country in saying amen to the vision of Oslo and backing the suicidal ambitions of Israel’s surrender-at-all-costs Left. The military brass was even louder than the media in demanding the unilateral, unconditional surrender of Israel in Lebanon and the abandonment of the Golan to Syria.

Meanwhile, now it’s Ariel Sharon who’s trying to capitulate his way into tranquility. Justwhat does he think the PLO-Hamas terrorists will do in Gaza once Israel has ethnically cleansed it of Jews and abandoned it?

Steven Plaut is a professor at Haifa University. His book “The Scout” is available atAmazon.com. He can be reached at steven_plaut@yahoo.com.